Voice Chat Coming to Twitter

Word has it that Twitter is to have a voice-chat feature added, though by third party JaJah rather than as an official feature, this coming Thursday.

According to Cnet, Jajah’s offering will be called Jajah@call and follows very closely the announcement from Vivox yesterday that it would be adding voice calling to Facebook via a browser plugin. Unusual as it is to see two services like this launch so close together, Jajah’s offering manages to make even less sense than Vivox’s by virtue of the fact that its calls will last a maximum of two minutes, in order to facilitate “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

The issue, of course, is that there’s very little reason for this kind of a service to ever become widely used. While we’ll concede that Vivox’s move to incorporate voice-chat into Facebook is at the very least interesting, and certainly useful for those who use Facebook exclusively to keep in touch, Jajah’s move to Twitter seems to demonstrate a fundamental change of medium.

Jajah’s model requires you to tweet “@call @thepersonyouwanttoring” which means that you’re calling is limited to one person at a time, a trick that basically negates the whole point of Twitter as a kind of closed-circuit broadcast system.

A commenter on our Facebook called Ben put it best when he said of the move to include voice chat in Facebook, “What’s the point in online voice cybersex with people you already know? Where’s the fun in that? Seriosuly.” You have to hand it to him, straight to the heart of the matter.